The literary world gathered in Durban for the 28th edition of the Time of the Writer Festival this week. In her opening address to the festival, author Shafinaaz Hassim argued that it’s not possible to gather in a community without thinking deeply about our circumstances, both immediate and on the global stage.
‘This perspective informs my position as a social scientist, my role as an author and without a doubt the way in which this year’s programme was curated. We live in a world where the balance of forces seems somewhat out of sync, and chaos reigns. We live in a world where the ground seems to shift beneath us every day; a world of increasing uncertainty. In this paradigm, there is barely time to process a singular distressful event before we are bombarded with more of the same.
The absurd is made real. And until we find ways to take our future into our own hands, we allow outside forces to dictate the uncertainty. A love for literature and literacy prompts us to celebrate the positive contributions of writers who have taken up the pen as the proverbial sword in the fight against injustices, in this case through the form of the Time of the Writer festival, and its sister festivals hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts.
Arts Festivals have a reputation for providing a platform for conversations that allow us to add to the dialogue about how we can tailor solutions to our lived realities and the impact on home ground, of what happens on a global scale.
The role of the arts cannot be underestimated; it carried us through the notorious COVID pandemic, and in many ways, it has been essential to our survival and the incredible body of memoir and biographical material being published in recent times is testimony to that.
We have a feast of personal memoirs and political biography on this year’s programming. The arts allow a boldness in the face of increasingly oppressive politics that leans to the right. That this festival in its 28th year is hosted in a country in the global south, in a UNESCO city of literature, is no small feat and cannot be ignored.
The legacy and the responsibility form an integral intersection, giving traction to the level of debates and engagement that must take place to create those shifts that we need in our thinking and in our ability to stand up and have our say. The message that needs to be impressed upon our youth and general public is, what we write and what we say matters.
And as much and as easy as it is to say we love books, and we love reading and sharing our stories, this is what love looks like in the public domain: a quest for social justice that we can contribute to as writers and practitioners of the arts, as curators of programmes where we can sit together in circles of community where we can bring our voices, our solutions, our healing.
A festival is a safe space where we can encourage a way forward even when words struggle to be formed. Our freedoms didn’t come for free. May we never forget. Writers continue to be essential in the fight for social justice. We resist through words and stories. We write to build bridges in a fractured
society. We make our way through the dark. We find light. We have the opportunity to rewrite our prejudices, and when structures of oppression persist against us, we collectively have the power to
change the narrative. And this is why we are gathered here.
The enduring legacy of the Time of the Writer Festival is what has informed my decisions and my process these past few weeks and months of bringing the 2025 programme together. Along with the seriousness with which we have consulted, contemplated and brought together this year’s programming, I have to admit the process has been a great deal of fun.
Because a celebration of writing, literature and story is essentially a joyous event. It brings book lovers together. What could be more delightful? I am confident that what you have to look forward to this week, in keeping with the theme of Imagination, Freedom and Accountability, is a feast of reads that will provoke, inspire and encourage you to take up arms in the form of either picking up your pen to write or adding to the ongoing conversations that inform and influence policy, shift social consciousness or challenge those who attempt to corrupt a way that is just and inclusive.
Writers and readers are able to shape society and conscience, inform and influence and challenge the status quo, and this impact is heightened especially when we bring our contributions into collective form at a literary festival. Fiction provides the platform for extending conversations, and as a vehicle of activism, it is the perfect method to move discussions through readers’ minds and the spaces in which we inhabit. Just watching how children engage with a story that is being read to them is ample evidence of how impactful a story can be in shifting how we find meaning in the world. Stories entertain us. Stories heal us. Stories build us. This is where we come together to provide the seeds in order to make it happen.
And this is why defunding the arts hurts not just the practitioners but the entire society that benefits from the creative process. Earlier this month, we said goodbye to one of South Africa’s legendary playwrights, a director, actor, writer, Athol Fugard, who through his immense canon of works, embodied precisely the principles for writing and dialogue towards a just society and world.
He employed the power of protest theatre as a form of resistance against apartheid, unapologetically exposing the injustices of life under apartheid, giving voice to the oppressed and thereby conscientizing his audiences to the harsh realities of the time. Fugard refused to play to segregated audiences and his eventual collaborations with the likes of John Kani, and Winston Ntshona produced exemplary works like Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), commenting on forced evictions and loss of identity under the oppressive regime. Years ago, I attended a conference in Johannesburg where I heard Nawal el Sadaawi speaking. El sadawi, an Arab feminist had been jailed for her views and writing against the repressive Egyptian government of her time. And she said, if as a writer, you haven’t challenged the injustices of your time, if you haven’t been jailed for your convictions, then are you even a writer?’
